Monday, 22 June 2015

The Eikonophobiacs Are On the Move - Again

"Following on from the recent blog post detailing the development of the Children, Internet, and Sex Cognitions (CISC) scale, this post will further explore the findings from this research, focusing on the permission-giving thoughts endorsed by individuals with an offence related to child sexual exploitation material (CSEM).

The figure below provides examples of permission-giving thoughts endorsed by individuals with a child sex offence, as identified by Ward and Keenan (1999). A starting point in the research that colleagues and I carried out was to explore whether these thoughts can be applied to individuals with a CSEM related offence."

"The notion of ‘cognitive distortion’ has become enshrined in the offender treatment literature over the last 20 years, yet the concept still suffers from a lack of definitional clarity.

In particular, the umbrella term is often used to refer to offence‐supportive attitudes, cognitive processing during an offence sequence, as well as post‐hoc neutralisations or excuses for offending.

Of these very different processes, the last one might be the most popular and problematic.

Treatment programmes for offenders often aim to eliminate excuse‐making as a primary aim, and decision‐makers place great weight on the degree to which an offender “takes responsibility” for his or her offending.

Yet, the relationship between these after‐the‐fact explanations and future crime is not at all clear. Indeed, the designation of post hoc excuses as criminogenic may itself be an example of fallacious thinking. After all, outside of the criminal context, post hoc excuse‐making is widely viewed as normal, healthy, and socially rewarded behaviour.

We argue that the open exploration of contextual risk factors leading to offending can help in the identification of criminogenic factors as well as strengthen the therapeutic experience.

Rather than insist that offenders take “responsibility” for the past, we suggest that efforts should focus on helping them take responsibility for the future, shifting the therapeutic focus from post hoc excuses to offence‐supportive attitudes and underlying cognitive schemas that are empirically linked to re‐offending."